EJ "Whoever is driving the Dodge minivan, you left your lights on. " him. Thomas pointed a gun at his head, and when a struggle broke out Thomas fired once, killing Gasgonia instantl I was drawn to Chris Thomas's case because I couldn't understand how a parking-lot stickup gone bad had ended in a death sentence. But after we stud- ied the record, it seemed clear to us that Thomas, like a lot of other defendants, was on death row essentially for the crime of having the wrong lawyers. He had been defended by two attorneys under contract to the Lake County pub- lic defender's office. They were each paid thirty thousand dollars a year to defend a hundred and three cases, about three hundred dollars per case. By contract, one assignment had to be a capital case. The fiscal year was nearly over, and nei- ther of the contract lawyers had done his capital work, so they were assigned to Thomas's case together. One of them had no experience of any kind in death- penalty cases; the other had once been standby counsel for a man who was de- fending himself In court, we characterized Thomas's defense as all you would expect for six hundred dollars. His lawyers seemed to regard the case as a clear loser at trial and, given the impulsive nature of the crime, virtually certain to result in a sentence other than death. They did a scanty investigation of Thomas's back- ground for the sentencing hearing, an ef- fort that was hindered by the fact that the chief mitigation witness, Thomas's aunt, who was the closest thing to an enduring parental figure in his life, had herse][been prosecuted on a drug charge 44 THE NEW YOR.KER, JANUAR.Y 6, 2003 . . by one of the lawyers during ills years as an assistant state's attorne As a re- sult, Thomas's aunt distrusted the law- yers, and, under her influence, Chris soon did as well. He felt screwed around alread)) since he had confessed to the crime and expressed remorse, and had been rewarded by being put on trial for his life. At the sentencing hearing, Thomas took the stand and denied that he was guilty; notwithstanding his many prior confessions. The presiding judge, who had never before sentenced any- body to death, gave Thomas the death penal In Illinois, some of this could not happen now. The Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been established to pay for an adequate defense, and the state Supreme Court created a Capital Liti- gation trial bar, which requires lawyers who represent someone facing the death penalty to be experienced in capital cases. Nonetheless, looking over the opinions in the roughly two hundred and seventy capital appeals in Illinois, I was struck again and again by the wide variation in the seriousness of the crimes. There were many monstrous offenses, but also a number of garden- variety murders. And the feeling that the system is an unguided ship is only heightened when one examines the fust- degree homicides that have resulted in sentences other than death. Thomas was on death row, but others from Lake County-a man who had knocked a friend unconscious and placed rum on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, for instance, and a mother who had fed acid to her baby-had escaped it. The inevitable disparities between individual cases are often enhanced by social factors, like race, which plays a role that is not always well understood. The commission authorized a study that showed that in Illinois, you are more likely to receive the death penalty if you are white-two and a half times as likel One possible reason is that in a racially diVIded society whites tend to associate with, and thus to murder, other whites. And choosing a white victim makes a murderer three and a half times as likely to be punished by a death sentence as if he'd killed someone who was black. (At least in Illinois, blacks and whites who murdered whites were given a death sen- tence at essentially the same rate, which has not always been true in other places.) Geography also matters in Illinois. You are five times as likely to get a death sentence for first-degree murder in a rural area as you are in Cook County; which includes Chicago. Gender seems to count, too. Capital punishment for slaying a woman is imposed at three and half times the rate for murdering a man. When you add in all the uncontrollable variables-who the prosecutor and the defense lawyer are, the nature of the judge and the jury, the characteristics of the victim, the place of the crime-the results reflect anything but a clearly pro- portionate moralitJ And execution, of course ends any chance that a defendant will acknowl- edge the claims of the morality we seek to enforce. More than three years after my colleagues and I read Chns Thomas's